If you are kind enough to have meandered a little around this site with its 3741 articles (making this number 3742) you may have noted a modest series about the songs that Dylan has only played once or twice in public. (A list of those articles is at the end of this piece)
That series is far from comprehensive because it turns out that quite a few of the songs Dylan has performed once or twice in public have no recording available on the internet of Dylan’s performance, although sometimes a site proclaims to have a live version only for it to turn out to be the recording of the song made in a studio, not a live performance in front of an audience at all. And I must admit that some of the others where there is a recording, are recordings of performances which really don’t have too much to say that we can comment on. That’s not to say the performance wasn’t worth hearing at the time, but now, looking back, I don’t find that version to have added much to the original.
But that leaves approximately 360 songs that Dylan has himself recorded, but for which there is no live performance by him of the song – and here I do simply mean a live performance, not a live performance which happens to have been caught on tape, or more recently recorded digitally.
And I find that an interesting thought, and not just because 360 is a pretty large number of songs to have recorded and then not performed. For in each case it means Bob went through the whole process of either writing or learning someone else’s song, and in many cases playing it through with a band in order to make the recording, but then never felt like adding it to a live show.
Now there are something like 620 songs listed on the official Dylan site that Dylan has either performed in public, or recorded and had released on record. So, to get the numbers straight, of that 620, 360 have been recorded and are available on one of the albums or collections, and 260 have turned up in a performance but not been released on an official album.
So, as is my way, while walking around the rather wonder countryside surrounding the village in which I live, I got to thinking about some of these songs that Bob has never performed in public, and I wondered why he hasn’t performed them, what it tells us about Bob (if anything!), and then asking, “has anyone else had a go with that song?”
Take for example the four songs from Another Side of Bob Dylan that (and as always I am taking my “facts” from the official site) Dylan included in the album, but then abandoned.
Put another way, why did Bob want to put Black Crow Blues, I Shall be Free No 10, Ballad in Plain D, and Motorpsycho Nightmare, on the album and then do nothing more with them?
I am not going to try and answer that for all four songs, but here I will just “Ballad in Plain D” whose non-appearance in public is the easiest one to answer – it is long (over eight minutes, delivering 13 verses all of identical music, and 438 words), and is said to be about the end of Dylan’s relationship with Suze Rotolo (which is why perhaps it has never been something he wanted to sing in public – although he obviously wanted to put it on the album.) Besides which, to retain the essence of the song it is difficult to do much in the way of musical variation.
In fact I have always thought (until this week) that to vary the music of that song as it progresses from one verse to the next would be to destroy the song, the whole essence of which is about the bleak sadness of life once one’s partner has gone – no matter what turmoil there might have been in the relationship while it was still there.
And because of that I felt also that it is difficult to think of any sort of arrangement that could be made of the song which would work, both musically and lyrically.
Except, I have found this one: Paul Anquez and Isabel Sorling.
I really do love this performance, and indeed I think it is fair to say that the first time in many years I have actually found a recording of this song that I want to listen to all the way through. The pianist is inventive but also totally sympathetic to the vocalist – which is very hard to do with a song that is strophic, and this long. There is, in short, variation and consistency in balance.
Indeed if you are not convinced do listen to how the duo perform the ending…
All is gone, all is gone, admit it, take flight
I gagged twice, doubled, tears blinding my sight
My mind it was mangled, I ran into the night
Leaving all of love’s ashes behind me
and keep listening to that final verse and that haunting final line “Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?” If then you are not convinced, ok, I’ve done my best and can say no more.
But if you enjoy the recording above you might be interested in some of the couple’s performance of Joni Mitchell songs such as “All I Want”which is also available on line.
So my point in bringing this up, is that I wonder if there really are any Dylan songs which no one has been able to re-interpret in an interesting way, and that even Dylan has not offered us a variant performance himself. If you know of any please do write to me Tony@schools.co.uk ideally with a link to the performance in question, and I’ll try and put a piece together (unless you wish to write a whole piece yourself, which I would very much welcome).
I don’t know what it means either: an index to the current and recently concluded series, appearing on this website. Details of the earlier episodes in this series are at the end of this episode
By Tony Attwood
Heylin, as I think I have mentioned rather a large number of times, is not, and never has been a musician. And yet he comments, often pejoratively on Dylan’s music. “Tombstone Blues” he tells us “should hardly have required half of the morning and a chunk of the afternoon to record.” Now I know that it can take me all day to get a decent recording of a five minute song, and that is just with me on piano and vocals, and the benefit of a classical music education (which tends to help the focus and concentration)
So it is legitimate to ask, how does Heylin know? Well, actually he doesn’t because a couple of pages further on he illustrates “how Dylan’s vision shaped the sound picture at every turn.” The fact is that the picture we get is of an artist who knows what it should sound like when he gets that sound, but not before. He is in fact, according to Heylin, stumbling toward the sound he wants without actually being able to describe it and direct the band toward it.
If that is true, fair enough, although we only have Heylin’s word for this. And Heylin is pretty nasty about this style of working, calling the versions that don’t get the music Dylan wants, “train wrecks”. In my experience they are as often as not, the occasional misplaced chord, or fluffed rhythm. No one dies.
But in the end it really does get a bit silly. Heylin suggests that Dylan was taking a “he who is not for us is against us” attitude with his music, possibly because people around him were treating him as a mesiah. Yet a simpler explanation (and really where there is a simple explanation that works it is generally advisable to take that one rather than any other),is that which I have touched upon before. Bob didn’t know where he was taking the music – there was no clear plan. But each time he did take another step forward in the right direction, he knew he had got it right.
One only has to listen to the early albums to hear the number of times Dylan did something musically that was not only unique but also musically and literally brilliant. And in this little list that follows I’m just putting down my instant thought – you will undoubtedly have completely different but just as valid choices
On Freewheelin we might nominate Don’t think twice, on Times it could be the title track or When the Ship comes in and Boots of Spanish Leather.
On Another Side I’d nominate Chimes of Freedom and It Ain’t Me Babe. From Bringing it all back home, any and all of the four songs on side two. On Highway 61, Desolation Row (of course) and Like a Rolling Stone
On Blonde on Blonde, Visions of Johanna (of course) and Just like a woman (although I’m tempted to add One of Us Must Know).
Thus I would argue that on each and every single album Dylan introduced not only a whole collection of really interesting songs that we still remember, but also some earth shattering masterpieces. And yet Heylin spends his time criticising the way Dylan worked on the recordings.
Just consider these masterpieces, coming out one after another, and then consider Heylin’s comment that Dylan “increasingly took the view “he who is not for me is against me”. On album after album Dylan had revolutionized our concept of what pop and rock music could be. And he did that not by travelling down the same track, each time seeing if he could take it a bit further, but in fact by deliberately creating something brilliant, and then heading in a different direction.
To put this at its simplest, here was a man who on one album gave us Desolation Row, and on the next album presented the world with “Visions of Johanna.” Criticising this period of Dylan’s work, or criticising his writing methods, or how he treated his friends or anything else, is a bit like saying that “Two Gentlemen of Verona” is Shakespeare at his weakest. Yes maybe it is, but it is still several thousand lightyears above what other men were writing at the time.
And criticising Dylan’s working methods, and the way he ran the concerts is equally daft, because what he was producing on record was clearly revolutionary and brilliant. Revolutionary because no one but no one had created music like this before, and brilliant because we are all still playing the music from that time nearly sixty years later. Sixty years in which billions of songs have been written and presented for our delectation, and which come nowhere near the standards Dylan was reaching then.
And all this was achieved by a composer who, through his own admission, and as can be clearly devised from the way he worked, didn’t know how he was making it happen. Some of the songs and some of the recordings just worked brilliantly and wonderfully. But Dylan could no more turn the creative tap on and off than could most composers. (OK yes it appears that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven could, and in popular music so could Irving Berlin, but it is hard to think of many more).
But Heylin does note in text, if not in his mind, what was going on. He quotes Suze Rotolo as saying “Bob soaked up everything”, and John Steel of the Animals “Dylan had his ears open all the time.” Tom Wilson is credited as saying “Dylan was always entirely open; he listened to everything.” And when the audience turned against him, Bob didn’t back down, but carried on. And on. “Dylan was impervious to criticism” as Heylin says (page 369) and that surely is the clue. He knew that he could get it right and keep on evolving his music at the same time, and if someone said he couldn’t, or that the last album was rubbish, he’d just keep looking to the horizon (which of course never got any closer).
And to do this, as Robbie Robertson is quoted as saying, “We rehearsed in front of the audiences, rather than before we went out.” Because that was the way in which Bob could get forever closer to a destination he didn’t know, via a route he didn’t know, using a methodology he could only guess at. So if the journalists attending a show were full of incomprehension, then so what. It was a journey, this was not the final destination
And it is all very well for Heylin to use cliches such as calling “I wanna be your lover” as “his postmodernist deconstruction of a Beatlesque love song” but it might have been better simply to suggest Dylan thought there was an alternative way of writing.
So instead of seeing Dylan’s writing as a revolutionary approach that takes us into totally different territory, such that Heylin’s attempt to reduce Visions of Johanna to a “psychosexual drama” in which Brian Jones is involved, rather than what it is: a story which like life itself, doesn’t always make sense. Hence the opening line.
You don’t know me darlin’ - you never would guess
I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest
I ain’t no false prophet - I just said what I said
I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head
The standard for the perfect introduction was set back in 1987, by Mandy Patinkin in Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” The sequence polite greeting – establishing connection – manage expectations has since been considered the format of choice for both business and dramatic overtures, but seems to be accepted in only very broad terms by Dylan’s prophet. Its compact effectiveness, for instance, the prophet certainly does not acknowledge. The polite greeting already took place in the second verse (“Hello Mary Lou – Hello Miss Pearl”), the verse in which we learn that the entire text is a dramatic monologue. At least, there is a “you” to whom the speaker addresses his words.
The return of the you, however, takes a while – lasting until this seventh verse. Whereby the switch from plural (“you girls” in the third verse) to singular in this verse (“You don’t know me darlin’”) suggests that the prophet is now addressing someone else in his audience. And all the while, the narrator has still not completed his polite greeting – after the hello, we still miss the My-name-is-Inigo-Montoya part, the part where the prophet is supposed to reveal who he is.
We are now over halfway through the dramatic monologue, and still the narrator smears his introduction – by boastfully piling up the qualities he says he possesses, by ad nauseam pontificating on what he is not all about, and by handing over meaningless calling cards like “I’m the enemy of treason”.
Gradually, we become suspicious. We are familiar with this kind of drawn-out, cryptic introduction. From Goethe’s Faust, for instance;
I am a part of that power,
That always wants evil and always creates good.
I am the spirit that always negates!
And rightly so; for everything that comes into being
Is worthy of destruction;
Therefore it would be better that nothing should come into being.
So everything you call sin,
Destruction, in short evil,
My actual element.
I am a part of the part that was everything in the beginning,
A part of the darkness that gave birth to the light
[etc.]
… the words with which Mephistopheles, the Devil, keeps delaying his answer to Faust’s simple question (“Wie nennst du dich? – What do you call yourself?”). Or from Jagger, who teasingly opens with “Please allow me to introduce myself”, then for 324 words does not introduce himself, but provides an endless string of hints to guess his identity, and then sings at the very end:
Ah yes, what's my name?
Tell me, baby, what's my name?
Tell me, sweetie, what's my name?
… who thus still does not say his name (“Sympathy For The Devil”, 1968). Similar also to one of the most famous dialogues from one of the most successful TV series of this century;
[Declan picks up the bag of meth and turns around. He looks at the bag
and turns back around. He laughs nervously]
Declan: Who the hell are you?
Walt: You know. You all know exactly who I am. Say my name.
Declan: What? I don't have a damn clue who the hell you are.
Walt: Yeah, you do. I'm the cook. I'm the man who killed Gus Fring.
Declan: Bullshit. Cartel got Fring.
Walt: Are you sure? That's right. Now. Say my name.
Declan: You're Heisenberg.
Walt: You're goddamn right.
… Walter White’s refusal to say his own name (or his pseudonym) in episode 7 of the fifth season of Breaking Bad (2012). Or like Death keeps beating around the bush in basically every anthropomorphic personification in any art form. In Casella’s 1923 play La morte in vacanza, Brad Pitt as Death in the film Meet Joe Black (1988) based on that play, in the TV series Supernatural (2005-20) and in Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel The Sandman, also televised: Death, too, employs cumbersome, cryptic and, above all unspecific hints to introduce himself.
Death, the drug dealer, the Devil… it is hardly a merry little club in which our prophet joins; the convention of saying unequivocally and clearly who you are seems to be something only the bad guys shy away from.
We see a similar restraint when the prophet performs the middle part of the perfect standard introduction, establishing the connection. Here again, the reflex of every bad guy resembles that of our prophet: mainly telling what the connection is not, and refusing to reveal what the connection then, in fact, is. I’m not someone you can know, oracles the prophet here, adding that outward appearances are deceptive: “I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest.” Nineteenth-century word choice, a personality description we might recognise from the works of Jules Verne, or Charles Dickens, but above all another “hint” in the enumeration of all that he is not, and indeed the active denial of any conclusions we might draw from his appearance. Conclusions that, on the whole, would not be very cheerful either; ghostly appearances usually are awakening sham deaths (in Verne’s Around The World In 80 Days, for example), cursed souls (Catherine in Wuthering Heights) or actual ghosts with usually little good in them (as in Dickens’ oeuvre, quite abundantly). Anyway: so our prophet is none of those, despite his ghostly appearance.
The only thing then that comes reasonably close to Inigo Montoya’s textbook example is the prophet’s bouncer, which indeed approximates “managing expectation”: I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head. However: even this is only approximate – what the vengeance will be and on whose head it will descend remains as vague as the identity of our prophet. It even could still be Inigo Montoya, of course. In a verbose mood.
To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 12: A manic depression is a frustrating mess
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Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Dylan on Tour: concert recordings selected by Tony Attwood
In this series I’m just searching the internet for complete, or near complete, recordings of Dylan concerts. In each case I’m not particularly concerned with the video – it is the music, and having the whole concert, or at least a lot of it, that is the heart of the idea.
At the moment I’m particularly interested in some of the earlier concerts, not least because of my reading of Heylin’s book “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” which I’m commenting on in the series, of the same name. The latest edition of that is The revolution begins, but no one understands, and I’m getting close to the end of that series. There is an index to all the previous articles in the series at the end of each piece.
This particular concert fascinates me because of the magnificent performance of “Visions of Johanna”. Indeed I think if one read “the Double Life” and without having heard any of Dylan’s concerts from the 60s, one would be utterly bemused to find just how wonderful a performance Dylan could give of that song at the time.
So this is one of the concerts in two halves. The first part lasts up to around 48 minutes, then you get the tuning up of the band, and the second half starts with “Tell me mama”. Indeed I would say that if you are reading Heylin’s book, or indeed if perhaps you have been following my commentary in the “Double Life” series on this site, this is a really record of what actually happened. It is nothing like you might imagine, just from reading “Double Life”.
The concert ends with “Like a Rolling Stone”and then if you leave it running, rather curiously there is a quick burst of a bit of the Britissh national anthem, which I think they still tended to do at the time in England.
Listening to it today I do find there is much more for me in part one than part two. But then I would also say that just reading Heylin one wouldn’t have a clue about what to expect, and part two is nothing remotely like the mess he suggests.
I hope you find something of interest herein, if you haven’t heard this before, or maybe not for a long time – and if you really have the time, contrast it with those concerts listed above.
The musicians in part two are Robbie Robertson (electric guitar), Garth Hudson (organ), Rick Danko (bass), Richard Manuel (piano), Mickey Jones (drums). There is not video (this was 1966 after all), but the sound quality is superb.
Bob Dylan — 17th May, 1966.
There is an index to the current series and some of the past series on the home page of this site.
There is a more complete index on the right side of this page (scroll down a bit) under Indexes and Reference Pages.
“The Lyrics and the Music” is a series by Tony Attwood which tries to find out what happens when one reviews a Dylan song not primarily as a set of lyrics, but as a piece of music which includes lyrics. An updated list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.
————
By Tony Attwood
“You’re a big girl now” is an interesting song to investigate in terms of the lyrics and the music because Bob Dylan changed the accompaniment (in terms of the chord sequences) once he had written the original. This is the original version…
I am grateful – and most certainly not for the first time – to Eyolf Østrem for tabulating this. I certainly don’t want to impinge on his copyright for all the work done in that regard… if you want the whole transcription it is here
But perhaps I may just give this opening which Eyolf Østrem has transcribed from that original as an indication of what was going on…
Emaj7 B11
Our conversation was short and sweet
Emaj7 B11
It nearly swept me off-a my feet.
E(iv) B(ii) A
Now even if you don’t know anything much about music and chords, you might well recognise that those chords above are the norm – but at least they are repeated, and you will be able to find them in any decent book of guitar chords.
So moving on this is what Bob did with the song when it was released on the album, again with the Eyolf Østrem transcription below.
Bm Am
Our conversation was short and sweet
Bm Am
It nearly swept me off-a my feet.
Of course you can see at once that Bob has simplified the chords. But also when you hear it, the song is still hopelessly sad, but is much more determined – the singer is much more assertive as to what he has done.
What this change (which I suspect many listeners will not have fully taken in – after all the focus is generally on Bob the singer, rather than what the music is doing) has done is made the opening less sad but more assertive. And the question arises, why did he do that?
We do know that perhaps more than any other contemporary songwriter Bob changes his songs repeatedly – the Never Ending Tour shows us that time and again. And it can be argued that he does this just to keep up the interest.
But I feel something more than that. In the first version above those chords give us a much more tentative feel to the piece. It is as if the edge within that short and sweet conversation is still there, making him feel very uncertain, not sure where to go next what to do next.
However the much simplified second version with its B minor to A minor chord sequence, retains all the sadness (minor chords tend to sound sad to Western audiences, especially when in an unusual combination as with B minor to A minor at the start of a song), but it removes the uncertainty.
And if there is an emotion that is conveyed by E major 11 to B11, it is uncertainty, for the simple reason that there are so many notes in those chords, that even when they are not played in full, there is still that feeling that we don’t know where we are. (E major 11 for example contains the notes E, G#, B, D, F#, A). Now not every one of those notes has to be played – although you most certainly must include the E, D and A otherwise the chord loses is shape and feel – but it is a complex chord which we tend to hear as representing a complex situation or state of mind.
B minor is a much simpler chord made up of B, D and F#. With that we know where we are. It symbolises sadness.
So what Bob has done in moving from the original version (from Biograph) to the simplified version (from Blood on the Tracks) is emphasised the sadness and I think the resignedness, over the confusion and uncertainty created by that original version.
It’s a subtle change and I know that most listeners without having studied a musical instrument will not really appreciate what is going on, but Bob made that change (quite possibly without thinking about or even knowing why) to get that extra emphasis in the song. He wanted to move it from uncertainty to resignedness and sadness.
This of course fits with the title of the album – “Blood on the Tracks” leaves us in no doubt as to what sort of world we are in. There is no sense of “I don’t know what’s going on” in that title, while the original recording of “Big Girl Now” is one of sadness combined with a lack of being quite sure why this has all gone wrong. In fact, exactly the opposite of “Blood on the Tracks”
As I just said, it is subtle and many listeners without the benefit of a knowledge of how chords work won’t be sure what has happened, but they will, I think appreciate what the feeling now is in the final version.
In short, it is a brilliant move by Bob the musician, and one that is missed in commentaries that focus totally on the lyrics.
by Wouter van Oorschot; translated by Brent Annable
I. Hors d’oeuvre
1. Who this book is (not) for – part 1
Look out kid, it’s something you did (‘Subterranean homesick blues’ – 1965)
There are at least three types of Bob Dylan admirers who are likely to take umbrage at this book (despite it not even being written for them). I would have liked to rake them over the coals here, but alas, the scintillae of my pen are not what they used to be, and I was born with too serious a disposition. These groups are: the Christian evangelists, some of Dylan’s countrymen, and the Dylanologists.
I can reassure the evangelicals at the outset: to them, this book is simply irrelevant. For seventeen years after debuting internationally with his first album Bob Dylan (1962), to a man the evangelicals gave him the cold shoulder. They would have no truck with his early songs such as ‘With God on our side’ and ‘Who killed Davey More?’ (1963), in which he brought to light how the Christian deity is routinely subjected to harassment and abuse by its own adherents.
He also often used God’s name ‘in vain’. Only when the words ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ suddenly started to appear with greater frequency in his work between 1979 and 1981 (and even ‘Redeemer’ for the first time), and Dylan, to the surprise of many, himself began displaying evangelical traits, did they promptly and unapologetically adopt him into their respective congregations, exactly as other groups had done previously.
But their enthusiasm faded again – predictably – as soon as the first two of the above Words returned to their previous frequency and quotidian usage in his work, with ‘Redeemer’ even disappearing almost entirely. Nevertheless, the evangelists were overjoyed with the two dozen or so ‘gospel’ songs that he produced during the 1979-1981 period, since their belief system – being a static phenomenon – is beyond all reproach, and so they simply and unabashedly cast him aside once more.
A slightly better formulation might therefore be: it is not this book that is irrelevant to them, but rather their belief system is irrelevant to my thesis. They will find nothing in it that proclaims the Glory of their Lord or His earthly representative. The only courtesy I am willing to extend to them is the inclusion of some odd capitalisations where necessary, as in the previous sentence. My view, incidentally, is that all faiths, regardless of the god in question, are a private matter, and one that I would like to see stay that way (to me, the public proclamation of one’s faith itself constitutes a form of harassment). And while I do respect Dylan’s own religious awareness, I do not consider it to be essential to the appreciation of his work.
The second lot of potential irritants is made up of some US-American admirers. They accept the whole Dylan – doubtless with some reservations, as I myself have – and not just the man who in his younger years, fell into religion in the ultra-religious country of their birth, and who occasionally used the terms ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ in his work.
While he does address God personally, (as in ‘Lord protect my child’, 1983) and ascribes omniscience to him (as in ‘God knows’, 1990), these speech habits are quite common to many. One particularly poignant such evocation is: ‘O God, there is no God!’ by the well-known nineteenth-century Dutch author Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-1887), who published his work under the pseudonym Multatuli, which in Latin can be interpreted as ‘I have suffered much’.
And while the latter undoubtedly also applies to Dylan, the difference is that he packages up this invocative habit in song form. And what of it? The US-Americans to whom I refer will most likely echo my interpretation of ‘Lord protect my child’ as an entirely personal prayer that is worthy of artistic appreciation, for while the artist involves us in the concern for his child (due evidently to his own inability to provide adequate protection), he refrains from imposing his prayer onto us.
‘God knows’, on the other hand, is to be taken on notice. The tenacity of the phrase, so typical of those claiming not only the ability to fathom their God but also the authority to harass others publicly with their findings, will cause them, too, to shake their heads with pity. It is a text open to interpretation that adds nothing either to our appreciation of the artist or an improved understanding of the subject matter. What more to say? For now, no more than this.
Even a cursory examination of Dylan’s work will reveal that he is no stranger to a certain religious understanding. This attitude likely stems from around 1954 when he completed his Bar Mitzvah, and from a worldview perspective at least, we can consider him to be of Jewish heritage. But the sole relevance of his religious awareness for his non-religious admirers is the fact that his view of humanity became demonstrably more sombre after ‘coming out’ as a born-again Christian in the period between 1979 and 1981.
From the Infidels album onwards (which dates from 1983, perhaps not coincidentally the same year as ‘Lord Protect My Child’), all of his songs dealing with society bear witness, without exception, to an apocalyptic view of humanity that was all but absent in his work until that time. ‘My own version of you’, the incontrovertible highlight of the 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways, is the most recent, poignant, and – thankfully – the darkest imaginable humoristic example of the same. We can therefore posit without exaggeration that Dylan, who was hardly a ray of sunshine to begin with, became considerably more pessimistic since his view of the Apocalypse became more concrete after having ventured more deeply into the Christian school of thought. Discussions of this topic are perfectly possible without resorting to theological treatments – the decline of the human species is, alas, not the exclusive purview of the faithful: oh, if only the non- and anti-religious would understand!
No, the annoyance of some US-American Dylan admirers will relate to their designation as ‘US-Americans’, as opposed to other American admirers from places such as Argentina, Canada or Ecuador. They find the term irritating, or at least cumbersome.
And although I can affirm the latter, still the distinction must be made, as Dylan’s art will be considered here to the exclusion of all the ‘(US-)Americana’ that it contains. Whoever is responsible for introducing the term ‘Americana’ into the music world: I have no idea, nor is it in any way relevant.
The term did not become fashionable in exegeses on pop music until the advent of the predominantly Canadian group The Band, who made a big splash worldwide with albums full of songs about a North America that was disappearing – or had already disappeared – beyond the horizon. They released seven albums, but their biggest influence came from the first and best two, Music from Big Pink (1968) and The Band (1969).
Because they also played a crucial role in Dylan’s career, we will encounter The Band again at a later stage. Now this is all well and good, but if their music had not been so exceptional and unheard-of before that time or since, they would not have reached the same level of fame with their song lyrics alone, however serviceable they may have been. The term ‘Americana’ would then not have appeared in pop music until much later, possibly as a direct result of Dylan’s work, in which it features prominently.
Once or twice: A review of some of the songs that Bob has performed just once or twice on stage, selecting those of which we have a genuine recording (and “genuine” is important here since I have found a few sites that seem to suggest they are a recording of a live version, but I have my doubts.) Text and video selection by Tony Attwood.
Seven Curseswas, according to the official site, performed by Bob Dylan twice, once in April and once in October 1963. But it seems that although several sites have a recording of the song live they are always from the New York City Town Hall in April that year. As far as I can find, the other time he performed it, there was no recording.
What we do also have is the studio version however, which is in a slightly lower key. I do wonder quite a lot about why Bob changes keys like this. Is it just his feeling on the day, how his voice is, pure chance, or for some deeper musical reason? No one ever seems to have considered it – or if they have, they’ve not written about it. So maybe there is no reason – he just does it.
Here’s the studio version…
It sounds to me that we have the second guitar playing in the Bootleg studio version, but maybe I am misjudging Bob and he was more adept at picking the guitar than I have thought. It could of course be Bob playing over the original recording which just the few extra notes the second guitar sounds to me to be playing.
But anyway, that in itself is not important for it is an absolutely wonderful sound from the accompaniment and perfect singing of a haunting song.
And I think that this series is maybe coming to an end. Not because I am fed up with it – actually I really enjoy finding these oddities, but rather because the number of songs that have been played just once or twice, and for which we have a recording, and which is a song of some particular interest, is not that great. If you know of one such song, which I have not covered, please do drop me a line. You could of course write the article and provide the link as well – if so that would be great, but if not, just tell me the song and the link to the recording. Tony@schools.co.uk
I don’t know what it means either: an index to the current and recently concluded series, appearing on this website. Details of the earlier episodes in this series are at the end of this episode
By Tony Attwood
Heylin in “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” describes the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone” in considerable detail. He sees it as a process, which I am sure it was, for not only is this song over 400 words long (which is very long for a song lyric in the rock music tradition) the performance lasts over six minutes (and this was at a time where the average recorded rock track was generally only half as long).
So, seeing how the song came to its final form is of course interesting for anyone who seeks to understand Dylan’s music. We look, obviously, to see both how he has created his greatest works, how they were initially received and Bob’s response to that reception. And we need to do this because we’ve got to the point in this series where Bob was about to create a revolutionary work of utter genius which challenged all the traditions and turned the genre upside down and inside out.
But although Heylin does take us through a lot of details, and notes Dylan’s own worry with the eternal question that highly creative people face (namely “How do I know I can do it again?”) his prime focus is on the chaos of the recording sessions, with the occasional rumour about Bob’s sexual health thrown in. However to be fair he does give us a lot on the first concert that moved away from pure folk into rock.
Now maybe it is true that no one knows how Bob came up with the idea of moving into rock music – although I think the article on Wikipedia gives us more insight than Heylin does – and I suspect that Bob’s comment upon his work, which is quoted by Heylin, is correct when he says, “What I’m doing now you can’t learn by studying; you can’t copy it.” But it is true only in one sense.
Heylin lets the comment go and instead of following it up, immediately starts to write about what other bands and composers were doing at the time. What he could have done (and he has after all had numerous decades as a Dylan commentator to think of this) is ask, in hindsight, was Dylan now really engaged in revolutionary work, and if so how and why. But instead of that we are told all about what Bob got wrong, as with “Before the first session he had already made a critical misjudgement” (involving supposedly telling Mike Bloomfield to talk to the musicians in the studio.”)
Now if you talk to any creative artist, who is willing to be open and honest, he or she is quite likely to tell you that much of the time, misjudgement is at the heart of what they are doing. When it works it works because the misjudgements are set aside and the work of genius shines through. And indeed this is exactly what happened with “Like a Rolling Stone”.
What one has to remember, and indeed Heylin does touch upon this, was that Bob was indeed going out on a limb, getting together a band and having studio time, but not having got the songs worked out.
So Heylin notes that Dylan, “having again arrived at a session with only one finished song… had no game plan”. That is a real put down and suggests that Bob was hopelessly haphazard in his work. And yet he is speaking of the set of sessions that gave us “Like a Rolling Stone”.
My response would be that whatever the method of working was, in the recording sessions that led up to the creation of “Like a Rolling Stone” they must have been right for Dylan, since they resulted in a work of revolutionary creative genius. The fact is that eventually, Heylin does recognise that one excellent early version of the song “comes out of nowhere. And goes straight back there,” and the implication of this comment seems to be this is all wrong. For as one who has spent a bit of time in recording sessions, that is often how it is in the world of pop and rock. Even when a song is fully written and rehearsed the first time the tape is “rolling” there is that extra bit of pressure and there’s a slip of the tongue and something goes wrong.
And this perhaps is because the right and wrong of creative acts (as long as they are not actually hurting any living thing or causing damage to other people’s property) which surely can only be properly measured by looking at the final result.
“Like a Rolling Stone” is an utter, absolute, total, revolutionary masterpiece and work of genius. So whatever process Dylan took himself, the studio team and the musicians through to get there, it must have been right because it got a result no one else had ever imagined before. The process was necessary for the genius composer to become the genius performer who could deliver his greatest work to date – the likes of which no one had ever heard before. So what is there to criticise?
Well for Heylin there is always something, as with the assertion (page 344) that “Like a Rolling Stone” was itself “actually based on a traditional Mexican folk song ‘La Bamba’.”
OK so maybe I am not the competent musician that I like to think I am, but I am absolutely lost in seeing that there is any way that the two are related
To dance the Bamba (Para bailar La Bamba)
To dance the Bamba (Para bailar La Bamba)
It takes a little grace (Se necessita una poca de gracia)
A little grace (Una poca de gracia)
For me, for you, ay up, ay up (Para mi, para ti, ay arriba, ay arriba)
Ay, up up (Ay, arriba arriba)
I'll be for you, I'll be for you, I'll be for you
(Por ti sere, por ti sere, por ti sere)
I guess someone needs to ask Heylin where he got this idea from But this reduction of one of the greatest pieces from the entire history of the pop/rock/folk/blues genre into La Bamba although (as it seems to me) it totally nosensical, it does serve a very Heylinesque purpose, in that Heylin proclaims it cleared the ground, so that by the time Dylan got to “Highway 61 Revisited” “he merely had to decide which characters to include and who to kill off.”
Now I really don’t quite get that point, but from here on Heylin appears to descend into quoting Dylan lines from hither and yon without really noting anything much except to give an indication that Dylan leaves lines in the songs blank so that they “can be readily filled in”. In short he is suggesting Dylan’s writing is all a bit haphazard and roughshod, and really, anyone could do it if they felt like it. A line here, a line here, write them all down, mix them all up, and hey presto! you have a song.
But such a discussion of Dylan’s approach to music is surely just a passing fancy, for it is very quickly over (and indeed given the trite nature of the discussion one might be rather glad of that) and instead by page 348 Heylin takes us onto the details of what Bob started to wear as his fame grew, as well as a fair amount of the argument between those who wanted Dylan to stay with the way folk and blues traditionally sounded and those who embraced Dylan’s new musical style. (And I must say as I paused to make a coffee at this point I did wonder, do the clothes actually matter?)
The fight between tradition and modernity, just like the fight between modernity and post-modernity, and indeed all other movements in the arts, is of course interesting and valuable in understanding the way art and life interact and move forward. But the fact is that Dylan was at this time at the very forefront of a movement which (to me at least) retained some of the essence of folk music, while taking rock music into a totally new dimension. After all, “Like a Rolling Stone” was unlike anything that had gone before. And thus the music and the lyrics deserve more discussion that Heylin seems able to bring to bear.
Although to be fair, Heylin is quite right of course when he says of Dylan’s creation of “Like a Rolling Stone” and his putting of a new band together to be able to perform his new compositions, that Dylan was “taking a huge risk to a potentially unforgiving audience.” Yes that is so, but Heylin lets the comment rest without considering it further. Heylin makes much of the naysayers, (“Rambling Jack Elliott thought it ‘sounded like horseshit”). But the question as to why Dylan felt like making this jump, is ignored. Which is a bit of a shame really.
Instead we get into a discussion as to whose fault it was that the sound wasn’t right, who was demanding that the volume should be reduced, who was in tears, who ran off to his car, and so on. There is an agreement that the audience booed the Butterfield, Goldberg and Dylan concert, and a long comment about whether the technicians were inept or the electronics and speakers were not up to handling what Bob and the band were doing. But not about the music and what Bob was doing.
And yet surely there is a point here. Bob Dylan had an idea, and pushed it through without testing anything out. The idea, it seems, was so important to him, it had to be tried out here and now. He didn’t want to wait for the right stage, with the right sort of equipment and indeed an audience who knew what to expect. He wanted his idea tried out NOW.
And that is interesting because it fits in so clearly with Bob’s creative approach (and that of many of genius artists) – he has an idea and he has to try it. No long re-writes, test runs, taking advice; let’s go for it. And that is, I think, central to Bob’s creativity. He has the idea he wants to go. I would say the same happened with his sudden movement between styles and approaches on different albums, and indeed his sudden change in the way his songs were created at different stages.
Allow me, if you will, to take you from the 500 or so words of “Like a Rolling Stone” to the songs of John Wesley Harding. Three verses, 118 words. And it is like that through most of the JWH album. Even “All along the watchtower” which is today often considered to be a much longer song has only 139 words. Or what I consider the utter work of genius from that album which really took on a new life in cover versions like this
The fact is Dylan changes as he goes, and never tells us why – but his music which is built around this notion of potential change, allows others to follow and rework the music in new ways.
Now the fact is (certainly up to this point, and I think, although I’ve not checked in detail, for most of the time since) most folk, pop and rock performers had their style of music, which they stuck to. They didn’t try to change the style itself, and they didn’t jump to another style. The tradition in the blues was verse, verse, verse, verse, with each verse being three lines of music, the first being repeated in the second.. The tradition of folk was verse, verse, verse etc, but without the blues format (which became known as the “12 bar” format). The blues could be played electrically, but folk was played acoustically.
Dylan with his move to electric, done without explanation and really with no expectation from those around, was a radical revolution, the likes of which music has rarely if ever seen. Certainly from my study of music history, it seems to me that much of the time styles and approaches to music evolved slowly. What Dylan did at this gig was to turn everything upside down without warning, and really without music experimentation – and as a result allowed others to take the path even further.
But back to this first electric outing. The article in Broadside, quoted by Heylin, says that by the third song “there was loud jeering and cat-calls from some parts of the audience”.
And to be fair to Heylin, he does cite the journalist who really did get to grasp the heart of the matter (if one can grasp a heart – I am not sure one can, but it seems the right phrase at the moment). Arthur Kretchmer writing in Village Voice said,
“Bob Dylan was booed for linking rhythm and blues to the paranoid nightmares of his vision… The irony of the folkorists and their parochial ire at Dylan’s musical transgression is that he is… this generation’s most awesome talent. And in eighty years you will read papers about his themes.”
That quote is carried by Heylin, and for that he must be applauded, for it surely was the most forward-looking and accurate comment made by anyone after that performance. But even so, I am not convinced Heylin fully realises even now how great a step forward this was. Before this moment pop and rock was confined to love, lost love and dance in songs that lasted two and a half minutes. Now suddenly they could be about the rest of life, about the rest of reality, and last about as long as you wanted to make them. It was the most enormous change in what music could do, and it was about as unlikely as Mozart suddenly delivering unto us a piece that sounded as if it had been written by John Cage or Beethoven asking to be remembered for the way he played the violin.
In short, and indeed in summary, Heylin seems totally to miss the point.
I’ve searched the world over for the Holy Grail
I sing songs of love - I sing songs of betrayal
Don’t care what I drink - don’t care what I eat
I climbed a mountain of swords on my bare feet
At the gate, the servant stops his master. In the distance, a trumpet sounds. “Whither is the journey?” the servant demands to know, boldly. Strangely, the master accepts being stopped and questioned. “I don’t know,” he replies, “away from here, if only away from here.” “You have no food supplies with you,” says the servant, still unwilling to let his master and his horse go. “I don’t need any,” the master says, “the journey is so long that I’d starve anyway if I don’t find anything on the way. No amount of food can save me. Fortunately, it is a truly monstrous journey.”
A hundred years before we hear Dylan’s prophet return empty-handed from his long, strange journey, we meet a kindred spirit in Kafka’s Der Aufbruch (The Departure, 1920) – or perhaps even the young, enterprising and determined version of our prophet himself at the beginning of his journey. At the time, the departing master left unsaid what his destination was, other than that it was away-from-here; the prophet coming home reveals what his goal was, though still not too explicitly: I’ve searched the world over for the Holy Grail. A metaphorical Holy Grail, we may assume. After all, the real Holy Grail was, as we all know, found by Indiana Jones in Petra in 1989, in The Treasury.
In itself not too original; in poetry and in songwriting, nine times out of 10 Holy Grail is used metaphorically. Occasionally the “real” Holy Grail still comes along, as with Van Morrison (in “Avalon Of The Heart”, 1990) or Roger McGuinn (“Round Table”, 1976), but these are exceptions. Usually, searching for the Holy Grail symbolises a romantic longing, is a metaphor for our pursuit of happiness. As in Springsteen’s “Dry Lightning”, for instance, Roxy Music’s “Mother Of Pearl” or Sting’s “Sacred Love” – songs, incidentally, where the romantic connotation “unattainable” is largely ignored, as finding the Holy Grail is something like “gaining her love”. Also highly desirable, of course, but still a bit more prosaic.
More mystical, and thus a little closer to the charge Dylan seems to assign to it in “False Prophet”, are the artists who see something like “creating a crushing work of art” as the Holy Grail. Mark Knopfler, for instance, in his dreamy contribution to the soundtrack of the unjustly somewhat forgotten 1997 film Metroland. At least, “the line unwinding to the Holy Grail” leads past very musical, and very Dylanesque intermediate stations:
I've danced in rain, and I've been Django
And I've got laid
I've been a rolling stone
I've been Verlaine
And I've been Rimbaud
Not afraid to walk alone
… in which, from Highway 61 Revisited through Blood On The Tracks to Slow Train Coming, Knopfler uses subtle Dylan references to describe his journey to “another world” beyond the “blue horizon”, the land where the Holy Grail is said to be. Or, equally Dylanesque, the journey of the protagonist from Thompson Twins’ “The Saint”, a modest 1992 hit with the furious opening
I had an icon that glowed in the darkWith psychotropic eyes and a plastic heartI had a guru, one vision, one dreamI saw the ides of March and they were looking back at me
… after which the narrator finally, after much prayer to “the Saint of the sonic groove” finds happiness in the last verse:
I have flown through the cosmic pale
I found the sound that was my holy grail
I rode the beat; I rode the drone
'Cause I am your pilgrim and I'm coming home
“I found the sound that was my holy grail”… and with that, we then seem to meet a soulmate of Dylan’s Prophet.
Dylan’s prophet, like his colleagues at the Thompson Twins and Mark Knopfler, has travelled a lot and endured hardship – our prophet has even climbed a “mountain of swords” barefooted. This particular image Dylan may have picked up in the Far East (“climb a mountain of swords” appears to be an ancient Chinese proverb to express the heaviness of a task), and other googling fans find that in the Buddhist underworld such a mountain is used as a torture set. But its keynote we have long known with Dylan. As yet bloodless in Hard Rain, where he “crawls over crooked highways”, in “Shelter From The Storm” it gets more gruesome as beauty walks over a razor’s edge, and in “Sweetheart Like You”, so nearly forty years before “False Prophet”, it’s as gory as Bruce Willis in Die Hard (1988; Willis walking barefoot over shards of glass during the Nakatomi Tower hostage situation) and as our prophet here:
You can be known as the most beautiful woman
Who ever crawled across cut glass to make a deal
And for what does this prophet climb the uninviting mountainside? He suggests that he hopes to find something like Solomon’s Song of Songs; I sing songs of love – I sing songs of betrayal – apparently, the Holy Grail the prophet hopes to find is something like the Mother of All Songs, the song that encompasses everything, the artistic equivalent of what physicists call the Theory Of Everything (and which, for now, seems just as unattainable).
Well, for that the Prophet might just have had to walk over to Dylan’s record cabinet. Under the C, he’ll surely finds Leonard Cohen’s Songs Of Love And Hate, and in the bookcase there might even be the 2011 Omnibus edition The Lyrics of Leonard Cohen; presumably the most complete collection of songs of love and songs of betrayal. And if he is very lucky, there might also be the old 1961 collection of poetry by the very young Leonard Cohen, The Spice-Box of Earth, which includes “The Adulterous Wives of Solomon”:
The adulterous wives of Solomon
Lie with young archers behind the filigree doors.
The music from his throne room, music of Negroes
And trained boys, comes over the night,
Past silver doors, into chambers
Where lovers never meant to betray their king.
How they sing, his musicians,
And our friends are lying unclothed,
Marvelling at the beauty of his court,
And though they betray him, these soldiers, these queens,
Why, they are the King's Men, they love and honour him.
A song in which everything comes together: love and betrayal, Solomon and the Song of Songs, holiness and sin. It just hasn’t been set to music yet – but if the Prophet asks nicely, we can be pretty sure his faithful disciple Dylan might be willing to do that for him.
To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 11: Say my name
————
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
[I read somewhere once that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the sixth article about the first track, ‘Mr Tambourine Man.’]
I am really just a tambourine
Good
Poetry
Makes the universe admit a
Secret:
‘I am
Really just a tambourine
Grab hold
Play me
Against your warm
Thigh
(Hafez, 1315 – 1390)
Those of you who have followed the story of this sublime song so far, as it unfolded in performance, might be forgiven for concluding that the ‘magic swirling ship’ that is the song itself had lost its magic for Dylan. Apart from two very different but very imaginative reworkings of the song in 1978, Dylan stayed with a solo acoustic approach to the song, which kept it rooted in the 1960’s, but by the early nineties he was racing through it as if he just wanted to get to the other side, mostly singing three but sometimes only two verses, the delicate, subtle nuances of the song lost in the blur and vocal fry. The song’s world weariness doesn’t come across when performed at full tilt, nor does its yearning for transcendence.
In 1994/95 all that changed and the song emerged restored to its full epic glory, all the verses restored, the magic restored, Dylan lavishing on the song the kind of loving attention we haven’t heard since 1966. In the stellar year of 1995, like the moon coming out from behind a cloud and sailing free, Dylan’s voice emerged from the creaky voice, glottal scrape of the early 90’s to give us soft, pellucid and intimate renditions that break new ground for Dylan as a performer.
But I get ahead of myself. 1994 was the entrée, 1995 was the mains, so it’s with 1994 we begin. The song is now thirty years old and ripe for reclamation. Early in 1994, the performances continued the brisk tempo and extended acoustic guitar breaks of 1993. Add a sensitive harp break and slow ending. This Kokura performance is similar to those of 1993, and only three verses are sung. As I see it, what is new here is, while keeping the feel acoustic, the full band is there and the influence of the steel guitar/dobro makes itself felt. And Dylan’s voice has improved. He’s stretching it, and builds to a fair climax at the end. (Kokura, 14th Feb) He does, however, seem to me to fake a line or two that he’s forgotten.
1994 Kokura
Later in the year (Boston, Oct 7th) however, we find the song further evolved. He has slowed it down, making it sound more wistful and heartfelt. This is the approach he will build on in 1995. No harp break, however.
1994 Boston
This next version from Nashville (Nov 7th) is a more confident rendition of the Boston arrangement, a better sound quality, and the video is worth watching. There’s a bonus with this one, a performance of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.’ This is essentially the same sound that we hear on the 1994 MTV Unplugged concert.
1994 Nashville
1995 saw an upswing in all of Dylan’s performances, and ‘Mr T Man’ was caught in that upswing. Dylan’s 1995 performances built on the previous year’s arrangement to deliver a series of brilliant, slow, dreamy renditions, intimate and tender. Dylan rediscovers the song. We could argue back and forth as to whether or not the 1995 performances are ‘better’ than those of 1966, but whichever way we look at it these performances give us a new feel for the song.
In my NET series I concentrated on the remarkable Prague concerts, with a nod to a couple of later performances of ‘Mr T Man.’ I still think the Prague concerts have a special magic to them, with a kind of keening spookiness, but here I want to pick up on two performances I missed in that NET series. Lovers of the song might well like to check out the Manchester performance, there’s a fine sound upgrade on YouTube…
…. but I prefer this Birmingham version (April 2nd). The recording is a bit clearer and Dylan’s performance is electrifying. What a pleasure it is to hear all the verses restored, some fine acoustic guitar work and Dylan’s haunting harmonica. The harp does not have the swooping, vertiginous sense of the 1966 recordings but is arguably more subtle and sensitive to the ambience of the song. And, again arguably, the slower pace of the song delivers its nuances more tellingly than the faster versions.
1995 Birmingham
Of course, this no longer sounds like a solo, or a two acoustic guitar performance. The whole band is here, but the song hasn’t lost its acoustic feel, and Bucky Baxter’s slide guitar is heard to full advantage, creating that dreamy, orchestral effect. Just how the addition of that instrument has changed Dylan’s sound becomes evident.
Aside from Prague, one of the best concerts of the years was Brixton, March 26th. Same arrangement as Birmingham, with both guitar and harp breaks, the epic scope of the song fully restored.
1995 Brixton
The soft luminosity of Dylan’s voice in 1995 was not carried over into 1996. A new grittiness entered Dylan’s voice, and 1996 saw some hard-edged rock performances, particularly Berlin
This was not the same scratchiness that bedevilled Dylan in the early 90’s, rather a deliberate roughness. In the late 90’s Dylan was able to sing softly, as we will see when we come to ‘Gates of Eden,’ but often chose a more jaggy, rugged voice, especially for the faster songs.
For this year I have chosen the Konstanz concert (July 3rd), a nearly ten minute epic with once more all the verses performed. He’s kept the slow pace with the guitar and harp breaks, but in this case he builds the vocal for the climactic last verse. This building the vocal to a climax is one way Dylan evolved in the late 90’s to deal with the length of his songs and the repetitive pattern of the verses. We get the same effect with ‘Desolation Row’ in those years.
It’s not as spooky as the 1995 versions but the passion is undiminished.
1997 was of course the year of Time Out Of Mind and much of the interest in that year centres on the introduction of live performances of some of those songs, like ‘Can’t Wait’ and ‘Cold Irons Bound’ but these new songs were introduced gradually, and Dylan didn’t overwhelm his concerts with them. He certainly didn’t forget ‘Mr T Man,’ which was performed some thirty-six times in that year.
In that year, however, Dylan was becoming enamoured with his own lead guitar playing, and dropped the harmonica in favour of an extended guitar break before the last verse and at the end of the song. We find a spirited and impassioned performance even though the third verse has once more been dropped, one suspects to allow more space for Dylan’s acoustic guitar picking. I prefer the 1995 performances, but admirers of Dylan’s late 90’s guitar work may well feel differently. And how Dylan’s voice has roughened since 1995, again possibly deliberately. The song has become more bristly, even aggressive compared to the mid-90’s performances. (Vienna Aug 23rd)
Vienna 1997
In 1998 Dylan follows the same pattern as in 1997, with the third verse missing and extended guitar breaks but there is a lovely gentleness in the tempo and Dylan uses the choruses to lift his voice into the passion of the song. This one’s from Sheffield, June 23rd.
1998 Sheffield
It’s worth comparing the Sheffield performance with New York earlier in the year, Jan 21st. I prefer Sheffield as the sound is softer and more reflective than New York, but the latter performance is better recorded, at least sharper, and the audience more responsive. The tearing edge in Dylan’s voice is more obvious here, as if he’s ripping it out of his throat.
1998 New York
We can’t pass through 1999 without taking in this video of Madison Square Gardens (New York) concert of that year. To my mind Dylan has done better vocal performances of the song, mainly sung here in a lower register, but his stage presence is irresistible, with one leg waving free while bending into a stunning harmonica break to finish the song. I recognise some of the harp riffs, which he uses to eerie effect in ‘Gates of Eden’ in the same year (we’ll come to that). You get the feeling that the song still has a strong hold on him, in this case taking his body for a ride.
1999 Madison Square Gardens
I wish I could leave it there for 1999, but in that year Dylan had leapt aboard a rising curve, the first of three peak years, taking him through to the end of 2001.
If we had a peak in 1966, and again in 1994/5, we get another peak at the end of the century. ‘Mr T Man’ was not the only song to benefit, but Madison Square Gardens was, for all its visual theatrics, perhaps not the most interesting vocal performance. For that, maybe, we should visit the Colorado Springs concert where Dylan, who doesn’t get into such theatrics, discovers a new melodic line for the vocals, dropping from a higher register to a lower one as the verse or chorus unfolds. For me this conveys a different sense of what it means to surrender, to start off high and then ‘go under it.’ We’re also treated to a subdued, quivering harp break at the end, which rivals that of Madison Square Gardens.
1999 Colorado Springs
What I did notice, however, was shortening of the last verse, skipping right over ‘the haunted frightened trees.’ Hard to know if that was a lapse or intentional, but it won’t be the last time we’ll notice it.
You’ll notice it in this otherwise perfect rendition at Layfette, ‘into my own parade’ gets lost in the dancing spells. Again, we don’t know if it’s intentional, however he seems to lose track of some of the song’s other lines, giving credence to the thought that these ellipses are mistakes.
1999 Layfette
So we look forward to 2000 and a radical makeover for the song. Until that time, take Hafez’s advice and become a cosmic tambourine!
The Never Ending Tour Extended: This series primarily uses recordings selected by Mike Johnson in his inestimable masterpiece The Never Ending Tour, and looks at how those performances of individual songs change as time goes by. The selection of songs from the series, and the commentary below, are by Tony Attwood. A list of all the songs covered in the series is given at the end.
——————
Today, I think it is maybe time to bring this series to an end – and “When I paint my masterpiece” seems an apt conclusion. But of course if there is a song that you have been waiting to see covered in the series please do write to me (Tony@schools.co.uk) and I’ll see if I can find anything to say. Or indeed you could write your own article on a particular song selecting examples from the series (just quote the article URL or title in each case) – and send it to the same address.
So to conclude for now, (except for a PS that I am going to add in which I indulge myself by picking my absolute favourite moment from the tour), here we have “When I paint my masterpiece”….
Between 1975 and 2024 Bob played this song 383 times. As ever our quest in this series is to look at how the performances changed over time.
This is interesting in that it is rare for Bob to start a song with a harmonica solo – and even rarer to go through two verses that way. After that we get an instrumental verse which Bob joins in toward the end. And then finally he comes in with his vocal.
This was the era when Bob insisted on taking his voice up to the top of his range for the last word of each line. It was a curious effect, and one that never appealed to me, and indeed the constant use of the technique seems to me to be tedious where there is nothing much else added to the performance, and the words are being delivered in a rush. So that even though I know the lyrics, I find myself losing track of the song.
There is also for me the impression that the vocal line is getting more and more frantic in the verse that starts around 4 minutes 20 seconds, and I can’t quite understand why – especially as the band plods along in an unvaried way.
I suppose my real problem is that we have getting on for seven minutes of a song in which the band is unvaried in its approach. The variation comes from the lyrics and the harmonica… and I don’t find either successful. But the audience obviously did, so, not for the first time, that’s just me.
And what a difference four years has made. Bob now sounds like he cares about the song rather than adding it to the show because it’s one of his more famous songs.
The accompaniment too takes us for a sympathetic ride – music and lyrics in harmony, even in the middle 8, and what happens thereafter. Performances like this which I really like, make me wonder quite how Bob can choose to deliver versions like that of 1991 – especially given the obvious affection in which he holds the song.
And yes, do take in the extraordinary instrumental break that starts just before the four- minute mark, and which is taken right back down by the middle 8 and the following verse. Better still it feels like it is coming to an end at around 5 minutes 30, but we get a really delightful instrumental break, which is full of surprises.
So now we jump forward – and from the off we know that this is another re-write as the opening is declaimed by Bob. And to our surprise, he doesn’t take up the beat immediately. Indeed the slow approach goes on into the middle 8, until half way through that we get the beat, and we are straight into a harmonica solo. It really is quite a rearrangement.
For me however there is a problem, because although the arrangement is interesting, I am not sure that it is enough to hold my attention for six minutes. Indeed if I may say so after the five minute mark, the endlessly repeated musical phrase (which sounds like Bob playing an electric keyboard although I could be quite wrong), is not one of the finest moments.
The performance does recover but it never reaches the heights.
So finally we reach the end and Bob is back to reciting, although with much more of a melody than has always been the case. But he has retained his view that slowing this piece right down to a recitation is the way forward.
And yet and yet, as we get to the three minute mark it starts to make real sense. Indeed I think this is the version that Bob was looking for throughout the tour. So I would say, even if you have not been impressed by what you have heard so far please stay with this. The latter part of the performance really is the best of the bunch, and would go onto my imaginary album of The Greatest Moments of the Never Ending Tour.
Postscript….
However if you have stayed with me through this rambling series of reflections you might recall that there was one moment when I jumped out of my skin with utter surprise. So although the conclusion of “Masterpiece” above really is a perfect conclusion to this series looking back at how Bob changed his songs across the years, I now must add my own selection of a masterpiece.
Since I first heard this when Mike provided it in July 2023, it has been right up at the top of my selection for the best moment of the Never Ending Tour. Best not only because it was so unexpected, but best because of its lyrical and musical quality.
For it was then, during the writing of this series, and still is now, the very best Never Ending Tour moment, not least because it was totally unexpected, for none of the earlier versions of this song on the tour gave us a clue of what was to come.
As I said in my review of this song when we got to it in this series, “Who, honestly, on hearing the original live versions could ever have imagined the song could be like this? How did he clear his mind of everything the song has been before, to get to this?…
“I play this, I keep playing this, and I am so, so grateful to Mike for having selected it from the thousands and thousands of extracts he listened to.”
Mike, I owe you so much for your original series on The Never Ending Tour, and for choosing Untold Dylan as the place for it to be published. And beyond that I owe you for giving me the ok to work on this second series which attempts to show how the songs evolve on stage over the years.
And to you, my reader, I do hope that if you have only taken in one or two articles in the series, you have discovered, as I have, the vast ability that Bob Dylan has as a re-arranger of his own work.
Of course inevitably most focus on Dylan is on each new song that he creates, and of course that is reasonable. But for me, if no one else, Bob’ ability to rework songs into totally new formats, or indeed just to make a handful of changes which can nonetheless transform a song into something new, is utterly remarkable.
If you have been following the series through all 58 episodes, or indeed if you have just dipped in once or twice, I hope you have enjoyed what you have found. And of course, if you do feel there was one song that I really should have included, do write and let me know and I’ll have a go. Or indeed you could perhaps write the article yourself, and send it in for publication. I’m, always delighted to hear from new contributors. As noted above, just write to Tony@schools.co.uk
A review of the Clinton Heylin book by Tony Attwood. Links to previous episodes are at the end.
In my review of “The Double Life” I am now two-thirds of the way through volume one and it is interesting that at this point Heylin suddenly says “the media didn’t know what to make of him [ie Dylan].!” And that of course is true. Journalists writing immediate reviews of shows, interviews and albums often have a very limited amount of time to get their words into print while the story is still “hot”, and so rely on past experiences, prejudices, and what everyone else is saying.
So here I would agree with Heylin, but then when a few pages later he adds that “Dylan was simply looking to wrestle free of the stereotypical straightjacket that lazy tabloid journalists thought they could wrap him in,” I fall off my chair. Not because the statement isn’t true, but because the “stereotypical straightjacket” of “normal” or “decent” or “reasonable” behaviour is what Heylin labours throughout the entire volume.
Dylan does not stick to the normal way of doing things in most aspects of his life, at least as far as we can tell. But then that is typical of the genius. And to labour the point once more, if one writes pieces of music, which quickly become artistic monuments in depicting a way of seeing the world, and which millions upon millions of people retain throughout their lives as part of their way of understanding what is going on around them, of course what lazy journalists (or come to that journalists rushed off their feet by lazy editors) write is irrelevant.
The social norms for someone who has written, “Times they are a Changing” or “Gates of Eden” or “Desolation Row” are irrelevant because of the attitudes and views those songs offer. Indeed they are doubly irrelevant when the genius artist finds (as Dylan has done on occasion) that new songs are not emerging from his brain in the way old songs have done. Remembering always, that it is most likely that Dylan has no idea how those songs emerged when they did.
But then, to make matters worse, Heylin, who spends much of this book not believing Dylan’s statements about anything, has the nerve to say at one point in offering an explanation of how he worked, “Not for the first time, he wouldn’t be believed.” (Page 320). And yet much of this book is packed with Heylin not believing what Dylan says.
What makes this more ludicrous than offensive however, is that in noting Dylan saying that “Times they are a changin'” is “not a folk song” Heylin finds it necessary to chime in with the statement “Nor was it,” as if somehow the truth or falseness of a Dylan statement needs Heylin to tell us if it is true or false!
The fact is we are talking about music – one of a number of art forms over which many of us will have our own feelings. That is the point of music – and indeed of most art that survives for more than a few months. We can always give explanations as to why a certain song is especially important, and those reasons may relate to memories of first hearing the song, an appreciation of the lyrics, an appreciation of the music, or just an indefinable something. Indeed if you have ever bothered yourself with some of my ramblings on this site you might well have stumbled across me raving over one of the many versions of a song most commentators never even get around to mentioning.
To me that is one of the supreme high points of Dylan’s work. The fact that it clearly wasn’t for Dylan himself, nor for anyone else I have come across, doesn’t matter. It is for me.
Thus the point is we all respond in different ways and so it is not surprising a composer with such a prodigious output produces works that different people appreciate at different levels and in different ways. And this gives the critic a problem because through modern media the multiplicity of views can be seen and recognised. But all Heylin can say in relation to this is, “Increasingly, the ever-widening chasm which separated Dylan form normality was artificially induced.” Quite how he knows, or come to that how he can measure the “chasm” we are not told. Personally I don’t see it being any different from the chasm I perceive between any artist and his/her audience.
But then when I listen to Tell Ol Bill Take 9 for the thousandth time, I don’t really care. It speaks me, as it always has. It relates to my life, my world, my emotions both musically and lyrically – and of course I know it means next to nothing to most people, including most Dylan fans. So I am more or less on my own with this one – but that doesn’t matter; it talks to me. Yet this is what Heyliin cannot grasp because he seeks to be the almighty reference point of Dylan for everyone else. Of course everyone who takes notice of the evaluation of classical romantic music puts Bach, Mozart and Beethoven at the absolute pinnacle but they do it by considering the music – not the tittle tattle of those composers’ daily lives. For with music a billion opinions are out there, and each as valid as the other. Part of the reason for this is that music, like all the arts, is an highly emotional event, and we each experience different emotions and respond to emotions in different ways. Another part is the music is abstract, which gives each of us something different to appreciate.
Of course, seemingly to gain attention, sometimes Heylin is just gratuitous in his insults, seeming to think that a page that doesn’t either insult Dylan, a song written by Dylan or a group of Dylan fans, isn’t a page that should be in the book. Ironically however Heylin notes a list of Dylan’s loves and hates written for the “hormonal readership” (as Heylin disparagingly calls them) of a magazine, and includes as a like “originality in anybody.” And maybe this is the cause of the entire problem with this book, for just knocking an artist because of his behaviour simply because one does not have the inclination or maybe ability to write about the music itself, is not only trivial but ultimately pointless. I can still enjoy the music of Chuck Berry, while being horrified at his attitude to women. Indeed if to be a great artist one had to fit the current moral code, we’d hardly have any great artists at all.
And that is of extra interest because Heylin has already expressed his dislike of Dylan’s behaviour on numerous occasions. So what we have is Heylin’s own view of how people should behave as a measuring stick against how Dylan behaves, behind which is the notion that it should be possible for Dylan to be the sort of man that Heylin seems to imagine himself to be, and yet still be able to write works of genius. And yes maybe some genius artists are like this, but my casual reading of the lives of genius artists suggests not – generally it seems because the art for a genius becomes more important than anybody else.
For myself, in my private life, I like to think I do go out of my way to help my friends when they are in need. My songwriting, my writing of articles for this website, and another site that I also happen to run, my nights out dancing, my book writing, these are all important to me, but never so important that my friends don’t come first. But then I am not a driven genius writer – far from it. So would I stop writing “Things have changed,” knowing that if I didn’t complete it now I would never recapture its brilliance, in order to comfort a friend on the phone who had just found her/his husband/wife was having an affair? I would like to think I could but if it were that great a piece, I’m not sure I could.
There is a telling phrase in an interview that Heylin quotes in which an interviewer seemingly lacking in knowledge in terms of what Dylan does says, “I’m trying to find out what you think you’re doing.” To which Dylan replies, “I just do it.” It’s a perfect answer from a creative genius – and one that Heylin totally fails to understand.
Unfortunately, I’m not well read enough to know how Salvador Dali coped with journalists but I like to imagine he was as impatient and frustrated with them as Bob Dylan is. For the fact is that Dylan’s understanding of his own work could well be the same as Dali’s understanding of what he did, as when Dylan answered a journalist’s question, “What do you mean when you say you don’t write about anything?” Dylan replies “I write inside out and sometimes the dimensions cross. I can’t write about the tress, I must write of the tree.”
That quote and indeed a lot more from that interview is in Heylin’s book and it contains some fascinating thoughts (page 328) but Heylin’s single response is that it “shows a Dylan trying to live outside the law and still be honest,” which is about as trite a response as one can imagine.
Indeed Heylin does recognise that Bob, along with virtually every artist whose work we can study and who has left a record of his emotional response to what he does, is wrapped up in his own doubt when he says “How do I know I can do it again?” And yet then Heylin immediately meanders off into a scene in which Sara and Joan Baez come face to face for the first time. There is no attempt whatsoever to investigate further Dylan’s artistic responses as he moves through his life. Instead, we jump straight back to domestic issues. And yes I know they can be influential of course, but even so, the artist’s drive to meet the demand for more and more of his work, while keeping the standard and originality as high as before, surely is a bigger issue.
However “The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 1” was apparently (according to the book’s cover) described as “gripping… hugely impressive.” So maybe I have just got this all wrong, and that of course is for you to decide.
In response Jochen sent me his own favourite recording of Alberta, with the note saying “I imagine there’s a strong possibility that Dylan is in the audience.”
This is Chad Mitchell Trio recorded I think at the “Bitter End”.
If you don’t know the Trio there is a decent article about them on Wiki and you can get an idea of some of what they did from this recording
The group had an interesting history as after a while Chad Mitchell himself left the trio but the remaining two members kept the name of the band and went searching for a new person to fill the gap. They got… John Denver.
It is also interesting to note that the Chad Mitchell Trio, like Bob Dylan, performed for President Obama at the White House.
“The Lyrics and the Music” is a series by Tony Attwood which tries to find out what happens when one reviews a Dylan song not primarily as a set of lyrics, but as a piece of music which includes lyrics. An updated list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.
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Alberta is interesting in terms of understanding Dylan in that we have three recordings of the song to compare – recordings which clearly have followed some rehearsal – the band knows what’s going on.
But just to be clear this has nothing to do with the Lead Belly song of the same name – I’m putting a copy of that below just to prove my point.
In fact as far as I can see the original version of the song that Bob sang was this one which came out in 1946 and was written by Mary Wheeler; Lehman Engel; W. J. Reddick; Conrad Thibault – which is to say all of them or any of them, depending which book you read.
For all the promise of a recording on the internet, I can’t find one I can verify. But this one below came from 1957. The song was seemingly composed in the 1930s (but this is one of those songs where everyone writing about it seems to have a definitive view that their view, their dating and their recording really is the original. Certainly, the Lead Belly song of the same name sounds nothing like this.
Recording number one by Bob is slow, relaxed, and gently swinging – and clearly fully rehearsed. Everyone knows exactly what each is doing and how it all fits together. There is a real feeling of affection for Alberta that comes across here, both in Dylan’s singing and in the harmonica playing.
Everything about the music is relaxed and peaceful. It delivers a feeling that the singer really does care about what is on her mind. And this very much includes the harmonica part.
So effective is the musical accompaniment that the fact that the lyrics are repeated over and over again really doesn’t matter.
But now version number 2 and here we have the drum beat which gives a more solid, purposeful, and less relaxed feel. The percussion was there before, but previously gave a less driven emotion to the song. We now have a bounce and we are more forward.
The trouble I have with this version is that the music is so bouncy that it is hard to get any feeling that the singer has any connection with the lyrics. We appreciate the rhythm and the music, but no longer the message. The harmonica part too, seems to be out of phase with the lyrics as well.
Alberta No3 starts with the rhythm and chordal approach of “It takes a lot to laugh” although of course once the harmonica comes in we know it’s Alberta.
This is now even more forceful. Now the singer and his harmonica playing is dictating to the lady that she really has to be here and talk with him and listen to him. He really is telling her – and the beat and fulsome accompaniment let us know that. We have really started to lose the original feel.
The Eric Clapton version takes the song back to a 12 bar blues with its pleading of “where did you stay last night”. Now the music has changed totally, and the lyrics really aren’t that central to the song at all. Gentility has gone.
In fact put it simply the only Dylan version that really allows the performance to reflect the lyrics is the first one of those above.
And if you have the time I would invite you to play a little bit of the final version (Acoustic live) and then the Bob Gibson 50 version. They are as different as chalk and, well, whatever you want.
My point is that musicians can often get carried away by their own performance of a song and in rehearsal become so familiar with the lyrics that they can forget what the lyrics are actually saying, and thus forget the need for the lyrics and the music to be as one. For me Alterta #1 achieves this link in a way that the subsequent performances don’t, because only in that performance are the lyrics and music in harmony with each other.
Once or twice: A review of some of the songs that Bob has performed just once or twice on stage, selecting those of which we have a genuine recording (and “genuine” is important here since I have found a few sites that seem to suggest they are a recording of a live version, but I have my doubts.) Text and video selection by Tony Attwood.
Long Time Gone is shown on the official site as being performed once in November 1962 and again April 1963. It then turned up on Bootleg 9: The Witmark Demos 1962-4, and it seems likely that the recording below is a live performance although with an out-of-tune guitar. There is a review of the song and its background on this site.
And for clarity I ought to add that this is nothing to do with the Darrell Scott song “Long Time Gone” – which is great fun but completely different. Here’s the Dylan version.
The song is probably drawn from Maggie Walker Blues – but I am still unsure of who Maggie Walker was. Surely not the Maggie Walker (1864-1934) who was the first African American woman to charter a bank and the first African American woman to serve as a bank president. So just a name chosen at random – just a friend of the original composer of the song? Who knows.
And just in case you missed it here is the Witmark recording.
What are you lookin’ at - there’s nothing to see
Just a cool breeze encircling me
Let’s walk in the garden - so far and so wide
We can sit in the shade by the fountain side
The car chase in which bone-dry Detective Sergeant Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) chases the villainous doctor in the Naked Gun series (1988-94) gets completely out of hand. The doctor crashes into a tanker truck, rolls on scorched and blackened after the explosion on the remains of his car, collides with an army vehicle transporting a cruise missile, survives that crash too and, clinging to the cruise missile, rams a fireworks shop – the ensuing explosion is infernal. People stagger out from the burning hell, fireworks spray out whistling in all directions and a bewildered crowd gathers on the streets. Debrin’s police instinct switches to crowd control: “Alright, move on. Nothing to see here! Please disperse!”
Same charge as Dylan’s Twitter announcement. When Dylan releases “False Prophet” on 8 May 2020 as a teaser for the forthcoming album Rough And Rowdy Ways, he limits the accompanying text on Twitter to “What are you lookin’ at – there’s nothing to see”, the opening line of the fifth verse. So he – or his promotional team – seems to attach a special value to it, but why is not entirely clear. Prompted by a sympathetic penchant for self-mockery, presumably. On its own, as with Detective Sergeant Frank Drebin, it is of course a line that signals that there is, in fact, something to see.
Bob Dylan – False Prophet live in Lyon 2023
The tweet is the scoop of the image that will also adorn all Rough & Rowdy Ways Tour posters – the grinning, well-dressed Dr Death with syringe and the shadow of a hanged man behind him. “Nothing to see” is thus decidedly ironic. Irony that in this song works as a kind of comic relief after the preceding verse; after all, we have just become better acquainted with the Prophet who boasts that he is second to none and the last of the best, who implicitly proclaims “Look at me – I am quite something to see”, and sinisterly adds that we should put everyone else underground – and then, with feigned assertiveness, parries the attention thus drawn with “what are you looking at?”.
The assertiveness of the opening line contrasts with the rest of the verse. The three lines that follow are conciliatory, breathe a pastoral atmosphere and outline an idyll;
Just a cool breeze encircling me
Let’s walk in the garden - so far and so wide
We can sit in the shade by the fountain side
A walk in the garden, cool, a fountain… the Dylan fan is inevitably reminded of the setting described in the opening lines of “Ain’t Talkin’”, the finale of Modern Times (2006);
As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden
The wounded flowers were dangling from the vines
I was passing by yon cool and crystal fountain
Someone hit me from behind
Bob Dylan – Ain’t Talkin’ (Alternate Version):
Not too far-fetched; like “False Prophet”, “Ain’t Talkin’” is a song of cut-and-paste from Dylan’s jukebox (The Stanley Brothers’ “Highway Of Regret” and “The Wayfaring Stranger”, for instance) and from Dylan’s library (Ovid’s Tristia, notably). And the tone of both is set by gospel overtones, larded with a faint but unmistakable Walt Whitman scent.
However, the most remarkable similarity between the two lyrics concerns the dualistic nature of the protagonist. Like the narrator in “Ain’t Talkin’”, the not-false prophet chafes at paranoid schizophrenia, judging by the mixed signals he gives off. Bloodthirsty vindictiveness on the one hand:
I’ll avenge my father’s death vs. I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head
or
I’ll just slaughter them vs. Open your mouth – I’ll stuff it with gold
… carried by blunt, aggressive talk, and, on the other hand, the gentle side of the narrator, evidenced by such gentle, amicable words as
I’m trying to love my neighbor vs. I sing songs of love
or
I beg your pardon vs. your smile meets my smile
… or like the whole pastoral terzet in this fifth verse, of course.
Gospel overtones predominate. “Walking in the garden” + “cool” has been a trigger for religious interpretation since Genesis 3; “And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” Christian interpreters of “False Prophet” welcome the suggestions and implications of the context, the circumstance that the strolling scene takes place right after “the eyes of them both were opened”, right after Adam and Eve have eaten of the forbidden fruit. “What are you lookin‘ at – there’s nothing to see” are then the words a poet may put into the mouth of Adam, who is now aware of his nakedness and hides to avoid being seen.
And, even more conclusively, Adam now has knowledge of Good and Evil, can indeed use his just acquired discernment to judge whether or not he is a false prophet. Statistically, by the way, the Christian interpreters have a point as well: in the canon and in Dylan’s record collection, a “walk in the garden” is nine times out of ten the Garden of Eden. In fact, only Dylan’s hero George Jones uses it once without divine suggestion:
When the leaves begin to fall in the autumn
And the raindrops drip from the trees
There's an old old man who walks in the garden
And his head is bowed in memory
… in the 1963 blockbuster “The Old, Old House”, the song eagerly picked up by Bill Monroe, by Dr Ralph Stanley and by the rest of the bluegrass world.
The other garden, the Garden of Gethsemane that Dylan sings about in “In The Garden” (Saved, 1980), equally delivers the religious connotations we all have when we in 2020 hear Dylan singing about a prophet walking in a garden. Stronger connotations even, as in this garden, after all, walks the most famous prophet of all time.
Otherwise not entirely conclusive, unfortunately. The garden of Gethsemane is primarily the place where Jesus spends His last night, agonising over what awaits Him, begging His Father that this hour pass Him by and this cup be taken away from Him. But ultimately He bows to the will of God, and with burdened hearts He welcomes the treason and strife, welcomes the Judas kiss and the subsequent skirmish that costs the high priest’s servant an ear.
Preceding words like I go where only the lonely can go, I’m first among equals, I just know what I know and I ain’t no false prophet all fit Jesus’ last night and His words during the subsequent trial in the Sanhedrin where He is condemned to death by Caiaphas and his henchmen. Still, God’s and thus Jesus’ will can only be done through the betrayal by Judas; Jesus is no enemy of treason, but rather wishes for that betrayal – implicitly in the New Testament gospels, explicitly in the fascinating, apocryphal Gospel of Judas.
On the other hand: if we already want to assign an identity to the first-person in “False Prophet”, Jesus is still a much stronger candidate than Detective Sergeant Frank Drebin. Who, incidentally, we do see walking in a garden as well, one single time. In the garden of the hospital Our Lady of the Worthless Miracle.
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To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 10: I found the sound that was my holy grail
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
As far as I can tell Buckets of Rain has only been performed once live by Bob – on 18 November 1990. As you can hear, the song is given quite a bounce compared with the original – which makes the music somewhat contradictory to the lyrics at the end
Life is sad, life is a bust All you can do is do what you must You do what you must do, and you do it well I'd do it for you, honey baby, can't you tell?
It is interesting that at 2’43” the band plays what sounds like a typical ending to a live Dylan performance, but then immediately Bob goes on with a repeat of verse one, and then a couple of harmonica verses. I wonder if that was a misunderstanding between him and the band?
Certainly a two and three-quarter minute song would seem very short on stage, but lengthening it in this way doesn’t really work for me.
Until this moment I’ve never really thought too much about this song and have never counted this as one of the major compositions of Dylan, although it is a jolly piece, but I think the main thing against it having a lot of outings on the tours is that it is primarily a short, jolly song about a sad situation. And I guess it is the shortness of the song itself, and the lack of much one can do by way of instrumental breaks, that makes it hard to fit into a Dylan show.
Here’s the original
Playing this straight after the knock about rock version that was presented live, is quite a shock. It really does work as a simple guitar and bass piece. I would suspect Bob felt this too after putting in the one performance – which loses the whole essence of the simplicity of the song.
I must admit I haven’t played this song for many a year and it is really refreshing to come back to it today. Yes it is the simplicity of the arrangement that makes it worthy of a place in this wonderful album. It needs no change. Now the “life is a bust” lyrics work perfectly. I doubt there is any other way to perform it. Hence only once.
And here’s a random thought to wrap this little commentary up with. Supposing one set out to play Dylan’s recordings of his songs in alphabetical order. I wonder how that would feel…. (If you want to try the alphabetical list of the songs is here.)
Incidentally, as I noted once before, the Dylan Haiku series came up with this for “Buckets of Rain”.
Various people
Seem to have a good time, but
They’re actually not.
Apologies, the numbering of the articles went awry last time – we are now properly organised numerically speaking. Links to previous episodes are at the end.
By Tony Attwood
Clinton Heylin is clearly a man who likes complaining. He complains about Bob Dylan’s behaviour, without relating it to the chaos that unbridled genius can bring to a life, just as he complainis about the “unseemly rush for contemporary relevance” of people such as Odetta, Judy Collins, Joan Baez and Johnny Cash, revealed (or so Heylin finds) by recording what he derisorily calls, “Dylan’s detritus” – by which I presume he means songs that Dylan wrote but did not put on his own albums.
(Which actually means Heylin misses an interesting discussion that can be had over why certain songs were included on Another Side, such as “Black Crow Blues”, the existence of which on that album has always puzzled me. Just as a reminder the penultimate verse of this 12 bar blues runs).
Sometimes I'm thinkin' I'm too high to fall Sometimes I'm thinkin' I'm much too high to fall Other times I'm thinkin' I'm so low I don't know if I can come up at all
Heylin is also something of a mindreader (at least in his own mind) and he accepts without question the late Tony Glover’s comment on a concert that, “You could tell the audience was puzzled but they didn’t want to be thought uncool by anybody, so they applauded just as vigorously.” And maybe some people do that, but actually knowing that a group of people cheer and clap just to those sitting around them that the individual has a deep inside knowledge of what Dylan is up to) makes debates on audience behaviour very difficult. After all, few people like to admit they didn’t understand something everyone is cheering wildly.
Glover’s comment is in fact a throwaway line that eminent musicians and critics might make in passing, but it is important to remember that quite often they don’t actually “know”. And that is an important point in a book which purports to be telling the real inside story about Dylan. As far as I can remember, Heylin never admits he is confused or unsure, which in terms of a book on Dylan seems to me to be a pretty big failing.
But meanwhile, seemingly at random, Heylin himself can criticise another critic, as he does with Irwin Silber, who wrote in Sing Out! that Dylan has lost contact with people. Heylin in fact is playing the worst game any researcher can play with evidence: pick out the bits that support your case, and ignore the rest, and claim your case is complete.
Except it is worse than that, because Heylin, critic of Dylan though he is, appears to see himself as the absolute éminence grise when it comes to viewing Dylan, as when he writes, “Unfortunately, what these worthy critics had yet to realize was that he was no longer theirs and that their words were increasingly mere background hum…”
One might reply that Heylin in that case is unworthier still, as a critic of the other critics who has himself, no consistent understanding of what Dylan was doing and has been doing all these years. Yet Heylin portrays himself forever as the man in the know. As for example when he suggests that Jack Elliot and Bob Dylan were together when they first heard the Animals “House of the Rising Sun” and each exclaimed, “That’s my version!” Heylin’s answer is “It was neither”.
Thus the Almighty has spoken, and like the Almighty he feels he has no need to explain himself. He just says and walks on – and my guess is because Heylin didn’t actually know where Dylan got his version from and couldn’t be bothered to do a bit of background listening.
In case you are interested the song did in earlier times sound rather different. Here’s a 1933 version from Tom Clarence Ashley and Gwen Forster…
And Leadbelly’s version works around the classic three chords of the blues – click on the link if you’d like to hear it.
Commentators generally note that Bob probably learned the song from Dave van Ronk, and we can certainly here the similarities.
Heylin makes nothing of this background but instead rambles through an explanation that is somewhat confusing and so ends up saying that we can’t tell who was the donkey and who the cart, which is about as abusive a way of relating a story about one musician talking to another about a particular recording of a song, as you can get.
This abusive recounting of the tale comes at a point in the book where we get an extraordinarily tedious (to my mind, if no one else’s) reporting of a meeting between Dylan and the Beatles which ends with a letter written by Dylan being referred to as “amphetamine fuelled” (with no evidence to back this up) and which suggests he (Dylan) might write a book.
And so the tittle-tattle continues. Richard Farina was apparently envirous of Dylan, Dylan is a control freak… so it goes on, although to me Dylan continues to come across as a man of enormous talent who has no one to guide him in terms of how to develop and evolve his talent. But then quite possibly maybe that is always so. I know myself as a very, very, very, minor, minor songwriter to whom some people (who have never written a song in their lives) can be quite keen to suggest how a song could be improved. Just as people who have never run a blog can be quite enthusiastic about how this one might be improved. (Although thankfully that doesn’t happen much on Untold Dylan).
And yes it is true that maybe occasionally commentators and critics might say something that is an interesting insight.
It is a bit like the fact that Heylin sometimes notes what Dylan wears at a gig. It might be slightly interesting, but in reality what is much more interesting is the way he changes the songs. (If you haven’t seen it perhaps I might refer you back to All Along the Watchtower – oh what memories!,which takes a listen to a few versions of the song over the years. I for one had forgotten just how much Bob changed the music from year to year.)
Heylin is critical of Dylan for responding to other songwriters who might play Dylan something they had recently composed, and (it is suggested) Dylan would not respond to the music but instead say, “well have you heard this” and show off his latest piece. But really there is no evidence that he was constantly like this or that he was particularly self-centred. Even I, as a very modest songwriter like to send recordings of a new song of mine to a few pals, when I am pleased with the result. For me, its a way of continuing the conversation. I have a painter friend who sends me photos of his most recent picture which I admire. When I worked in the theatre friends would come along and be positive about the production, even if it wasn’t that good. I’d do the same for them whatever art form they were engaged in. Heylin however simply doesn’t know how to do compliments; maybe he just doesn’t get many.
Indeed even when Bob does try to explain how he has written a piece, Heylin dismisses it as “unconvincing” – although he rarely tells us a) why Heylin finds it unconvincing, and b) why we should particularly note Heylin’s point rather than Bob’s. In fact what Heylin doesn’t realise is that most creative artists find it hard to explain what they have done, and even harder to describe how they have done it. For if they could, then each new work would be as masterful and stunning as the last. But that is rarely the case.
Heylin quotes (page 286) a poem of Dylan which includes the lines
do Not create anything
it will be misinterpreted
which is probably very good advice, especially when there are people like Heylin around, especially as Heylin can dismiss “Another Side of Bob Dylan” as “the patchy fourth album” (page 287). Is it possible to create a whole album in a matter of months in which all the songs are of the standard of “Spanish Harlem,” “Chimes of Freedom,” My Back Pages,” and “It ain’t me Babe”? Probably not.
The fact is that Dylan has existed for most of his life in a world of adoration and dismissal, issued by utterly non-creative people who have never written a song in their lives. Of course he “seems to function from the centre of his own thoughts” as Joan Baez once said. and Heylin for some reason quotes twice (pages 288 and 290). But who, with this level of genius bubbling away inside his head, would not?
Yet what is so annoying (to me, for this is throughout just a personal response to the book) is how Heylin can quote what seem very important comments from Dylan on his own work, and then just pass them by. Thus the filmed comment, “How do I know I can do it again?” is a feeling that is part of the lives of most artists. OK not Bach, Mozart or Beethoven, or in other genres, Chaucer or Shakespeare, or Leonardo, but it often is for other artists still of genius, but not quite at the ultimate level.
Heylin can listen to a truly wonderful piece of music such as “Farewell Angelina”, and merely comment that Dylan “leaves imperfect, living proof he has given up any attempt at perfection.” And for me this is another key. Most artists leaving aside those on my little list above, know that each work has imperfections within it, but that they will probably never be able to resolve them without bodging up the whole work, so they leave it at that, and move on. Heylin doesn’t get this with his own writing because (and of course this is just my opinion) his whole book is a bodge.
In reality, most artists don’t strive for perfection. They strive to create the best piece of art that they can. When perfection occasionally occurs (I would start with nominating the last movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony for example), it happens. The genius reaches the summit. There is nothing to do except either listen to (or if you are very lucky) be part of a performance of the work.
There are hints that Heylin understands this throughout the book. For example, he quotes the late Bruce Langhorne as saying “We didn’t do any rehearsal, we just did first takes.” Heylin responds, “Yet somehow everyone sounds like they are all working from the same prompt book,” without taking on board the implication of that. It just is there as a statement of Bob’s oddness and how single-minded he was, rather than a reflection of the sort of sound and emotional feel Bob wanted in his songs.
Which is rather a shame, because it means that when it comes to actual music, rather than people doing things, Heylin really doesn’t understand too much about what is going on.
The Never Ending Tour Extended:This series primarily uses recordings selected by Mike Johnson in his inestimable masterpiece The Never Ending Tour, and looks at how those performances of individual songs change as time goes by. The selection of songs from the series, and the commentary below, are by Tony Attwood. A list of all the songs covered in the series is given at the end.
Today I am hoping to answer a question that occurred to me just recently – did Bob actually change “All Along the Watchtower” that much in the 2,269 times that he performed it on the tour?
The earliest version I have in the files comes from 1978 – which is before our series on the Never Ending Tour started (which is 1987) but playing it now I really enjoyed the difference from the show-ender that I remember
Just listen to the solo of what I presume is the electric violin
However ten years later in The 60s revisitedthe song has moved on a long way, and here again I find refreshment in the way the song is spaced out somewhat, and the way the bass manages to add a little counter-melody of its own. It is repeated over and over until the final instrumental section prior to the rather strange slow down and (which I find) a slightly odd conclusion.
But more to the point, Mike’s commentary hit the nail, when he noted, “packed into four minutes, it makes its statement and gets out with none of the wild improvisations we’re going to find further down the track. This is the unadorned core of the song, and as such is typical of these 1988 performances.”
By 1992 we have added an introduction which tells us exactly what is going to come but seems to keep some of the audience waiting (at least judging by the roar when the song proper starts).
What I really like here is the way Bob sings in such a laid back way, and yes we feel the hour is indeed getting very late.
But also do listen around 2 minutes 15 seconds and onward to the short instrumental section – while when he comes back Bob is singing in an almost resigned manner. It is as if he is telling us about the end of the word in a way that accepts the end is nigh while all around everything is breaking up.
And I must admit I had forgotten how varied the instrumental breaks could be – and when around four minutes he played the harmonica in a very restrained manner, then being imitated by the guitar…. wow really I had forgotten all that.
I wonder if Bob was ever told that he was employing an ending format (ending a piece in a minor key by resolving it to the major chord) known as piece de picardie which was widely used in 17th century baroque music, but then fell out of fashion as it had become something of a commonplace effect. I’m not sure I’ve heard him do it anywhere else. This is 1992.
And yes as I work my way through all the editions of the song on the Tour I am amazed by just how Bob and the band did manage to keep finding variations. In the 1995 version below there is still that plodding bass moving up and down, but there is no sense Bob has had enough of the song – this is a new angle, and the low-key musical break after 2 minutes 30 seconds, again adds yet another element to the song.
In 2007 the opening is thumped out but suddenly we are taken back down by Bob as it becomes clear that the rhythm behind the singing is different. And I am actually rather pleased I decided to venture into this song – for my memory has played naughty tricks on me, leading me to believe that the song was performed in a similar way across the years. Of course it wasn’t. How stupid can an old timer get?
So just listen to how Bob has changed the way he calls out the lines of the verses and how the band responds – by the three minute mark we really are into a radically different interpretation yet again.
And so on to the end – 2018. It really does change again – you only have to listen to the opening and you know – and that is before the backing vocal comes in. It is forever the same song, but these variations really are quite extraordinary. And what’s more the variations continued all the way through.
Indeed I would say even if you have not felt the need to listen to the earlier musical examples (and how dare you if that is the case), please do listen to this. It will hopefully send you back to some of the previous versions.
The fact is this is a dead simple song with just two alternating chords, and yet he managed to get so many variations out of it over the years. The violin part here is brilliant beyond belief.
We’ve started publishing links to a few complete Dylan concerts that can be found on the internet, and that we have enjoyed returning to.
Obviously, the concerts can be found through a bit of browsing, so I was a bit concerned that the idea might not be of any interest, not least because this doesn’t really fit with our name of “Untold Dylan.” But looking at the number of hits these concerts get, I’ve decided to keep adding the occasional concert to the list – not least because it seems each time we do, our readers then go on to other concerts and articles.
This time it is Bob with Tom Petty in Australia 1986.
The songs performed are below. The links are to earlier articles on this site about the songs. There have of course been many other articles on each piece – you can find them through the search box, if you wish.
As for me, I utterly enjoyed coming back to this show – the quality of performance and the quality of recording are equally excellent.
